


Unsigned

by galadrieljones



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Heavy Angst, Love Triangles, Post-Canon, Post-Trespasser, Touch-Starved, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-01-20 22:53:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12443574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galadrieljones/pseuds/galadrieljones
Summary: Set two years after the Exalted Council. When Solas learns that he fathered a child with Nume Lavellan during the Inquisition era, he returns, hoping that she will allow him to meet his daughter. But with years of bitterness and separation between them, and a quiet relationship forged with the good man Thom Rainier, Nume is torn.





	1. Letter

She was a blue mystery. She lived alone in a cottage on a hill, and nobody ever saw her but the people who she cared about, the people she allowed. All the kids called her the Witch of the Outskirts, because she had a strange, molten, magical arm, and her hair was always knotted in the back of her head with a piece of vine, and she did not speak much, and this made her seem crazy.

She was not crazy. She was twenty-eight years old and just trying to get on with her life in a way that didn’t get her noticed. Something she could live with.

She sometimes came down in the mornings with her young daughter on her back, and she brought fresh kill or fresh flowers to the tent towns in the valley below. These tent towns were full of people who had once been refugees of the civil war. And though the Inquisition may have been a thing of the past, and their troops were all just empty armor in the dust, the people here still believed in her. _Her_ people. She was their Herald. She was their window and their yellow star. She never forgot this. She sometimes liked to drink heavy brown liquor with the healer of Redcliffe in the evenings. She was another elf and she believed every last thing there was to believe about the Dread Wolf.

“That bastard should get his head cut off,” she’d say, a withered woman who still managed to look pretty as hell. “I’ll do it myself.” And she would take a big drink. She’d set the cup down hard and wipe her mouth on the back of her hand.

These small signs of solidarity were validating to our former Inquisitor. But she didn’t want his head cut off. It was a good head, a nice head, and once it had made lovely words just for her. No. She didn’t want death to the Dread Wolf. She didn’t know what she wanted. 

Sometimes, she found solace in the good man named Thom Rainier. He would come down every now and again and help her with the firewood. He would take her on dates and teach her carpentry. Once he asked her to marry him while they both sat with their bare feet in Lake Luthias. The gesture had been so earnest that she cried, but she said no, because she did not love him, and he might have loved her but it wasn’t the kind of love you marry for. Or, was it? Maybe it was. How the hell would I know? Love and marriage and love and marriage. Maybe they have nothing to do with each other at all.

Her daughter was four years old, and she liked to plant daisies and jump off the highest step of the porch, and she sang strange songs of her own invention. She had very dark brown hair and gray eyes like a sleet storm. _Wintry Mix_ –that’s what Scout Lace Harding had called it once. She had compared Solas’s eyes to _wintry mix._ Like snow and rain all balled up into one very cold, very wet weather phenomenon. It had been about two years since the Exalted Council. She hadn’t told him about the baby, not even then. Fucking asshole. These days, she found temperance in her will to survive. She thought he must have known by now. A man and a mind reader. There was no way he didn’t. No way. And yet, he was not there, still was not there, and to be honest, she didn’t expect anything more.

One day, she found a letter in her letterbox, unsigned, but written in a familiar handwriting. She fell down and threw up and thought _Oh no, please no,_ that she might be pregnant with a baby, a baby by Thom. She was not ready. She was not ready for that, not now. But the letter was from Solas, and maybe that’s all it was. The fact that he had been there, had left it there, or he had sent somebody who knew him, and who knew her as well, to deliver it on his behalf. The letter contained only four short words: _  
_

_May I see her?_

After she was finished, she got up and she wiped her mouth on her apron, and her daughter was calling her from the open front door. 

“Is that from Kieran?” she said. “He said he would write to me soon.”

She smiled and she folded up the note, and she put it in her pocket. She went to her daughter and gave her a kiss on the hair. “Not yet,” she said. 

“Who is it from?” she said. Her eyes were very big and inescapable. Her ears were just like his. 

“Nobody,” she said. “Let’s go in. Let’s have cottage cakes for dinner.”

“No jam,” said the child, hands on her hips. “I _hate_ jam.”

It was enough to remind her that children are their own unique creatures, independent of the parents who create and raise them. It made her sigh. When they went inside, she put that letter in a jewelry box. She had not yet made up her mind. She was not so easy, and she was not so fast. She knew that he knew this. She needed to think on it. She needed to make some cottage cakes and think on it. And that night, the sky came down in rain–just rain–and filled the lake and left a small bit of flooding out in the back lawn. It sank the fence around her garden.

Thom came by to fix it the very next day. She did not tell him about the letter.


	2. History

Her name was Nume. She was named after the fields where she had been born in the buried winter edges of the Vinmarks. Fields of violets. Her mother nursed her there, in a tent, for about four months before the clan moved on.

She remembered now, how when she’d told that story to Solas, they had been in her quarters at Skyhold, wrapped up in blue bedsheets, and he drew very quiet and looked out the window. He was curious. He asked her if she preferred violets. He had been partial to daisies himself, he said. They reminded him of his mother and her weary will to survive. He rarely spoke of her. She got the feeling that something very bad had happened. _They do not die so easy,_ he said about daisies. The constitution of weeds. They looked like weeds when grown in fast, heavy bunches, but by themselves in slender jars on tables, they were lovely. They were perfect little pieces of pristine nature.

 _I like daisies,_ she said to him, in earnest, and she kissed him, and it was enough. She did like daisies, and she held no particular attachment to violets. None whatsoever, so she made up her mind. Looking back now, she could see the small tells in his disposition, how he held himself so far away. They would make love, and he would bury his secrets inside her. The first time had been somewhere in the Hissing Wastes, out of doors, beneath the stars like a velvet sea. He was very strong, and he did not use magic like maybe she thought he would. He made love like a man who needed love. He gave and took in equal proportion. He held her to the earth and made her feel things, and she did the same to him. The night he got her pregnant, he'd already ended things. But the days were so long without each other. She missed the length of him, and he missed her insides, and so they had too much wine at the Herald's Rest, and they rekindled. Once. In the old bedsheets. She didn’t even think about it at the time, when he came inside her, because he’d said her name in such loving fashion as he did it. _Nume,_ he moaned. _Vhenan,_ he moaned. She thought he was coming back to her.

Life was a dream with Solas, and everything a fantasy in the space from dusk until dawn, their lives filled with fire and emotion and heart. He made her violets. He made her daisies and butterflies. Getting pregnant didn’t fit the narrative. Biology, she had not factored in.

She had her daughter at Skyhold, about seven months after Solas left. She hadn’t figured it out till he was already gone, and when he was gone, he was _really_ gone. She learned this the hard way. There were no letters, no lingering goodbyes. She didn’t realize she was pregnant until she was on her hands and knees, throwing up on the banks of the River Dane, somewhere outside of Crestwood. She could hear the horses, shuffling at camp on the other side of the trees as she sat back on her heels, and she wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and she was alone, and she looked up at the blanched and white hot sky, and she knew. She just knew. The dream was over. He’d said it was real, and she probably should have believed him. She soldiered through her pregnancy, growing and foolish, unable to acknowledge reality at all until the baby was born. Morrigan was there to hold her hand, and Mother Giselle and Cassandra. And by the time the Exalted Council had arrived, she was so bitter with his continued absence, that she made the choice not to tell him about the baby. Seeing him again was like a knee in the chest. Now. Now he shows his face. To tell her he was sorry. To give her no recourse, but to confess his love, and then leave again. As if what they wanted was as fruitless as dust. His _duty_ to the past scorched everything they’d ever touched, including each other.

She hated him so much. There was a scar in her heart. She no longer understood what kind of man he was. What kind of man does this. She thought she had wronged herself and wronged her child in ways that froze her bones. It was the end of the world. So she did not tell him about the baby. She did not tell Fen’harel about the baby.

The arm was replaced with a worse-off version, and the Inquisition became little more than a collection of spies with Leliana at the helm. The Commander still gave orders. Some of her old crew had gone to Tevinter, trying to track him down, but that had been almost a year ago or more. The truth was, she didn’t know what was happening, and she did not care. She lived in her house in the Hinterlands near Lake Luthias, with her daughter, whose father was Solas. She tried so hard not to think about it, about him, or to hate him anymore. Because it had been years. To hate someone like that—it is exhausting. She did not want to grow old that way. So when she received his letter, and she saw those four simple words— _May I see her?—_ and she realized that he knew, once and for all, she considered it. She considered it very carefully for three weeks. But meanwhile, when the good man Thom Rainer came around to fix her fence, and to give her daisies, and to teach her daughter how to build a bird bath, she tried to look upon him lovingly, and she feared telling him the truth, because she knew him.

There were few people who hated Solas more than Thom Rainier. The man who had come through, who had accepted and atoned. She worried that if he knew what she was considering—allowing Solas back into her life in any capacity—that he might leave, and she wasn’t ready for that. She wasn’t ready to marry him, but she wasn’t ready to lose him either. Sometimes, it was because she loved him. Sometimes, it was because she had grown so irrevocably attached to his place in her and her daughter’s life that the thought of one more man’s forced absence filled her with fear and dread. So she lied to him. She just thought that, in a perfect world, a daughter might know her father, and maybe she could get Thom to see that. In time. Isn’t that okay?

She thought it might be a bigger mistake to deny Solas, because she’d be denying her daughter, too, and though she hated the thought, the truth was that she wanted to see him again. In her stupid heart of hearts, after all these years of anger and bitterness, she still held out hope. That he would change his heart. That he would be a good man. Because for a long time, she’d thought he could. And maybe after all these millions of mistakes, even if only for his daughter, and not a lick for her—forget about her, who the fuck cares about her—he would come through.

Was it so bad to wonder? She didn’t know. But she was not the sort of woman to sit and wonder forever. She had done that before, ignored the truth, for a long time—loving Solas. She saw only what she wanted to see. She wouldn’t fuck that up again. But she was having such a hard time figuring it out. She did not know how to decide for herself.


	3. Hesitance

The night was cool, the sky wide open and clear as liquor. He’d been coming down from the village where he lived and helped out at the smithy. He was late to Nume’s, but he’d sent a courier ahead. He took a shortcut through the hills that night that he did not normally take, but there was a small creek that ran through these parts, and a lot of good hunting, which Nume partook in occasionally, as she taught her young daughter how to use a bow.

Hands deep in his pockets, Thom walked without thinking, without looking back. This was a considerable part of his life now, these evenings spent with Nume, spent walking from the village to the outskirts where she lived. He felt responsible, still grasping for his own atonement, and perhaps none of this was healthy, but how could he be sure. He loved her. She was a gentle woman with a terrible pain and a daughter who needed guidance in the middle of a tired predicament. Fatherless. He did not attempt to assert himself inside her life as a father. He was not her father, but he was a man, and he had the ability and the determination to be there, in any capacity she needed. He fixed the fence. He loved her, and he loved her mother. The three of them planted flowers in the garden, and they cooked dinner together, and they went into the village sometimes and appeared as a single, happy unit. People knew them. He was not a father, and he was not a husband. He held no delusions per his role in either one of their lives. But he was hopeful, and he was happy, and he thought that for now, this was his domain, and he was a man of his domain, and if there was any single thing he could do to improve the life of Inquisitor Lavellan and her young daughter, he would take it. For as long as she and circumstances would allow.

That night, Thom Rainier moved quickly through the hills. He wore a linen jacket and had his hair knotted at the back of his skull, and he went along lightly. A brave man, he was unconcerned with the quiet dangers of the Hinterlands. He knew these parts like the back of his hand. He stumbled upon a fire beneath a long outcropping of limestone in the gentle slope of a valley. The fire was enchanted. There was no smoke, only heat so as to avoid attention and a heavy leather tent and a cooking spit, a bedroll and several heavy books. Everything reeked of elfroot, and the camp seemed to have been in place for several weeks, at least. This was not altogether unusual, Thom thought. There were many mages leftover after the civil war who still made makeshift homes out here. Nume’s presence had sanctioned theirs and made it protected. Thom did not think twice about this. It seemed to be only temporarily empty, and he could sense that whoever lived there was out gathering, or hunting, and would be back soon. Thom quickly scanned the area for anything unusual but did not want to interfere on affairs. This was not a patrol, and he was not on guard anymore.

But that is when he saw something unusual, marking the camp. The wolf’s jaw. That's what it had to be. It was slung to the end of a long leather lace and draped over a measured sitting stone. At first, he thought he was seeing things. A coincidence. But when he got closer, and he picked it up and held it and felt its weight and sharp edges between his fingers, he knew that it was the same one, and he was so confused, he dropped it to the earth and looked around sharply. What was this, he thought. What was it.

He heard rustlings then, in the trees nearby, and the long strides of tall man’s approach.

Solas came out into the valley. It was slow motion. He had several dead rabbits strung together and thrown over his shoulder, staff in hand. The long tip of the blade stained red. He was smoking, casually, flicked the burnt out joint to the earth. It took him a while to look up and to realize what was going on, that Thom was there. Once he finally did, he pulled a doubletake, blinked quickly. He froze and dropped his staff where he stood. The valley was filled with a lonely dark all of a sudden, thickening into rage.

Thom was on him, right away. The reaction was immediate and expected. He wrapped his heavy, gloved hand around Solas’s throat, and he put him on his back in the weeds, hard. Solas was a big man, and so when he went down, the dirt beneath him scattered, and the noise he made as his back hit the earth was choked, the wind knocked clean out of him. They were equals in height, and Solas was a good warrior, magic or not. But in a game of raw strength, Thom was his better, and they both knew it. Thom was older and more physically aggressive as a trained chevalier and a former front line man. Solas hardly struggled. He gripped Thom's wrist with both hands. It was almost loving. To the untrained eye, a glimpse might have cast them as lovers in a moment of rough undoing.

“You,” said Thom, seething.

Solas said nothing. You could hear his gasps, stifled things beneath the stars up above, pouring into the earth like winter. He stared at Thom in a quiet kind of fear, an animal fear. He drew no magic. His eyes were wide open, as if he he saw everything.

“There is a kill order out on you, elf, “ said Thom, tightening his grip. “I see you, I’m supposed to kill you. Commander says.” He tilted his head, put his face very close to Solas’s, knee pressed into his chest. Thom leaned into him. The noises that left his body were strangled and breathless. “I don’t know if you can die, but I’m tasked with taking my chances.”

“Do it." His voice was a croak, but surprisingly deep as he held on. “Do it." He put pressure on Thom's wrist, bearing down heavier, cutting off his airways. For a moment they met in the whites of their eyes, and somewhere in the trees there was an owl.

Thom released him.

Solas grabbed his throat on instinct and coughed, repeatedly, until Thom picked him up by the collar, slammed his head back into the earth, once, then he got to his feet, left Solas wretching, dry, on his hands and knees in the dirt. Thom backed into the camp and surveyed the situation. He waited as Solas recovered, cracking his knuckles in his palms.

Solas stood one foot at a time, boots in the dirt. He dusted off his leather armors and their makeshift pelts, and he coughed once more and dug the heels of his hands into his eyeballs. He rubbed, and then he shook out his head, and he straightened up and looked straight at Thom. He was angry and confused.

“What are you doing here,” said Thom. “Solas.”

Solas said nothing.

“Did you hear me, elf?” said Thom.

“Your chivalry is showing,” said Solas. He reached into his pocket. He took out another joint, studied it between his fingers. He seemed entirely unmoved by the altercation, though he was out of breath, and you could see it in his eyes he was physically jangled. “That was always your downfall, Rainier. You really should kill me.”

“Fuck you,” said Thom. “The last thing I need is your blood on my hands. No matter how I crave it. She's been through enough."

Solas looked up, squinted through the light from the stars. “Did she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That I wrote to her,” said Solas. “A note. Nearly a month ago. About the girl.”

Thom crossed his arms over his chest, raised his chin. He said nothing. He didn't know what Solas was talking about.

“She didn’t tell you?” said Solas. He was surprised. “I thought the two of you were together.”

“We are what we are,” said Thom, unwilling to engage. “You're here for the girl. It’s been four years, Solas. If you knew the truth, what the fuck took you so long.”

“I did not know," said Solas. He shook his head. His voice cracked. He lit the joint with a handful of fire, and then he smoked mercilessly. His eyes, bloodshot. He was a broken man. He looked around, dropped his chin to his chest as if ashamed. "Blame me. But I only learned from a spy I had planted in Redcliffe six months ago. She and her Inquisition have kept this an extraordinary secret, and I do not know why.”

“You just learned?”

“She never told me,” said Solas, releasing the smoke from the corner of his mouth. “I don’t keep tabs on her, Rainier. I told her I would never do that, and I did not lie. Why didn’t she tell me, two _years_ ago? Why?”

“Would that have changed things?”

Solas seemed uneven, but he was not far gone. He did not look up from the valley floor and was both hard stricken and bound by his guilt. He released a great deal of smoke from his lungs. “It changes everything.”

The wind rattled through the canyons in the hills. The weather was changing. The days were getting shorter, the nights colder. Thom could feel the chill on the air. He took a step closer, out of the light from the fire.

“I’ve been here for a month,” said Solas. He finished the joint, tossed it, stamped it out and stepped past Thom into the camp. Thom turned to watch. “I have not once spied on her. I know where she lives. I stay out of the way. But I just needed to be here. In case she changed her mind.”

“Changed her mind about what.”

“About letting me see my daughter,” said Solas. "My _daughter_. I have a daughter? The notion blinds me. But I know now that Nume didn’t even tell you that I contacted her, and you have no idea what I’m talking about. I don't know what that means, but I know she got the letter. I know she read it."

“What are you doing?” said Thom, curious. “Are you planning to stay, Solas? Have you washed your hands of all that shit you told her back at the Council?”

“I don’t know,” said Solas. “I am not a man of many faculties at the moment. Perhaps you’ve noticed, old friend.”

“You cannot do this,” said Thom, shaking his head. “You cannot dip in and out of her life again, particularly not after what happened last time. She lost her fucking arm, stripped the Inquisition to its studs.”

“I know that,” said Solas. He’d dropped to a crouch, his elbows resting on his knees as he hung his head between his shoulders. “I did not know about the arm until this past year."

"She's got a replacement," said Thom. "Thanks to Dagna and Dorian, but it hardly does the trick."

"I want to see her," said Solas, looking around, frantic like some sort of drug addict. A man possessed. It seemed he had not slept in days. "I just want to talk to her. Just—once. If I could just see her again—fucking Nume—perhaps I’d know what I want. But I know what this is. I know that it is not fair to her, and I will not show myself to the child until I have her permission.”

“Why don’t you just go to her in the Fade.”

“Because it doesn’t work like that anymore,” said Solas, shaking his head out. “She shut me out long ago.”

“Then perhaps you should let it go,” said Thom, dusting his hands together. “Leave. Attend to your plans as you were so contented to do before you found out you’d fucked up and gotten her pregnant.”

“Can a man not change his mind?” said Solas. “You of all people should be able to tell me that.”

“How old are you, Solas?” said Thom, his voice like gravel. “I don’t mean in millennia. I mean in your body.”

“I’m thirty-four,” said Solas, without a moment’s hesitation. He scratched an itch on the back of his neck, shut his eyes. 

“Thirty-four.”

“Yes. Why."

“You read older than you are. Or you did, once.”

“I spent a long time grooming my disposition, Thom. That was a rhetorical choice.”

“What are you really doing here?” said Thom, stepping back into the firelight. He became very serious, hands in his pockets. “Do you want her back?”

“No,” said Solas, but Thom could tell he was unsure. “I don’t know. Even if I do still love her, what does it matter?"

Thom said nothing. In honesty, he did not know.

“But she’s a reasonable woman,” Solas continued. “If she knew I was here, perhaps she’d let me in again." He tossed a pebble into the fire. "Let me see our daughter. Fuck."

“She’ll only do that if she knows you’ll come back.”

“I know this," said Solas. "But I cannot promise her I’ll come back if she will not see me.”

“Do you want to come back?” said Thom. “Truly, Solas. Is that what you want? It may not be what you think it is. Nume's is not a glamorous life. Not anymore. There may be nothing for you here but territory, and if that is the case, then she will see right through you."

Solas fell back into a sit with his knees up, put his head in his hands. The way he looked then, it was so desperate, so raw.

Thom could feel the cold tug of camaraderie yanking in his chest. He’d once fought by Solas’s side. More desperation, more injury, death in the tiresome, black valleys of war. This did not leave men unchanged, bearing their souls to one another in the weary trenches between life and death. It left men in pieces, sealed into barrels, meant for lovers to unseal and put the pieces back together again. Solas was frantic and broken there. Everything taken away and washed clean in the abject silence of night. That’s what he was doing. That’s why he had not fought back. So Thom took a deep breath, and he made a choice.

“Mina goes to a playgroup in the village in the mornings on Thursdays,” he said.

Solas looked up. “Mina?”

“There’s a Chantry sister who runs a daycare for many of the merchants' children in town. Nume is in the house alone at that time. She uses it for chores, and to gather her energies. If one wanted to speak with her, alone, that would be the time to do it.”

Solas was staring at him, the realization slowly coming together. He nodded once, the hollows deep beneath his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, eagerly.

Thom said nothing. He did not know if he had done the right thing, but he could not say otherwise. He bid farewell to Solas, unsure as to whether or not he'd ever see him again, and he left the camp. Then he left the valley. He heard the man, slowly dismantling in his wake, piece by piece. He did not look back.

 

Nume’s house was not far. By the time Thom arrived, she was already asleep. He slipped in through the backdoor with a key he kept on hand. When he got to the bedroom, he held her hand, softly, and she opened her eyes and she burrowed into the sheets beside him. She invited him inside, black hair soft, curling against the pillow. She made noises that communicated her warmth, that she wanted him. He took off his heavy boots, and he shook his head.

“I’ll just stay in the guest room tonight,” he said, “and get to work on the fence first thing in the morning.”

“Thom, wait,” she said.

But he couldn’t do it, not tonight. He pushed the hair off her face and kissed her on the long tip of the ear. Then he left her, and he retired to the guest room where for one whole hour, he sharpened the blade on his knife by the light of the moon before he pulled back the covers and closed his eyes.

Not tonight, Thom thought over and over again as he tried still to see the good in his place here. Not tonight. Tonight, he just couldn’t. Thom was a man of his domain. But this was no longer his domain. Not with Solas in the picture, not in any shape or form. He had seen them together, fully formed at the apex of the Inquisition. It seemed they would be together forever, the way they held hands, the way he flung his arm around her, chewing her hairpins in a most casual demeanor. But then he changed.

The wolf eddied like a specter in the valleys below, all alone. Haunting the dreams of Thom Rainier. But worst of all, she was hiding something. That is how he knew that the tides had never turned, and no matter what she said, she might never get past it.


	4. Gamble

When she woke up in the morning, Thom was already in the kitchen. Mina had her hair braided neatly over her shoulder—Thom’s handiwork, and she was set up with a lovely display of watercolors and heavy parchment while Thom made scrambled eggs in a pan over the stove.

“Which do you like better, little bug,” said Thom, stirring the eggs with a spatula. “Numbers, or colors?”

Mina sighed dramatically, pressing the brush to the paper with some dexterity for a four-year-old. “I like animals, Thom.”

He chuckled. “Yes, well. You would.”

Nume came into the kitchen wrapped in a linen robe she often wore in the mornings. The weather was cooler, so she also had pants and slippers. “Good morning, vhenan,” she said to Mina, and she kissed her on the hair.

“We’ve been up for hours,” said Mina. "Where have you been?"

“Hours?” said Nume, looking at Thom.

“I’m not sure she knows all that an hour entails,” said Thom. “I've been up for hours. She's been up for about three quarters of an hour.”

“Is that a fraction?” said Mina, earnest. She had painted a bright and happy sun cresting a distant blue hill.

“Yes, it is,” said Nume.

“What do you know of fractions, little bug?”

She giggled, and she looked at her mother. “He’s a jokester,” she said.

After breakfast, Mina went outside to water the daisies. It was her daily chore. She did it with great vociferousness and insisted that she be left alone.

“I worry she’s whip smart,” said Nume, at the table, dipping her finger into a mug of lukewarm coffee. “She’ll give me a run for my money.”

Thom sat down heavily across from her, and refilled her mug. “You’d be lucky to have a child who outsmarts you. Keep your edge up.”

Nume smiled, then she sipped. She cleared her throat as if to speak, but she said nothing. Thom had been reading from the paper, but he’d set it away the moment Mina went out the backdoor. He held himself very tense that morning. He drank from his second cup of coffee on the day and then he folded his hands on the table with intention.

She seemed not to have remembered the night before. He did not always share her bed. They did not live together. But he did not typically deny her invitations like that. "Is something wrong?" she said.

He took a very deep breath, settled in, looking down at his scarred and battered knuckles. “I need to tell you something,” he said, and he looked at her. He couldn't preface it any other way. He could still feel the elf's weight on his hands as he chucked him to the valley floor.

“Tell me,” she said, intent. Her brow furrowed. She’d used to have a most delicate vallaslin that played out above her eyes like tree branches. Mythal, that was as far as he could remember. It was gone now.

“I ran into Solas last night,” he said, glancing back to the door, for Mina.

It all dropped off a cliff then. Her eyes were cool. Her hair was down. Her voice was small. “What?”

“He’s here. In the Hinterlands. I stumbled upon his camp. It seems he's been here for near on a month.”

She was a beautiful woman, Nume. She’d lost a great deal of weight since she lost her arm. It was muscle mass, mostly, gone to the dogs. She was like a spindle. And she crumpled, almost visibly now. She stared at him, frightened, as if searching. “He’s here?”

Thom shifted in his seat. He nodded, though she was not looking at him. “Yes," he said. "He knows about Mina.”

She looked up then, terrified, coming into realization and she shook her head. “Thom.”

“He said he wrote you a letter.” He cracked his knuckles in his lap, squared up with her. “Asking if he could see her. Is that true?”

She swallowed, big. There were tears in her eyes. “Yes.”

He remained calm. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I know I didn't,” she said. She regrouped, inhaled and closed her eyes so that the little tears plopped out, one by one. She shrugged, resigned. “I’m sorry, Thom. I needed time. To think about it, privately. I would have told you. I promise.”

Thom understood this. He was not angry. He reached for the jar of milk in the center of the table, poured a little into his coffee, stirred it with a butter knife. He set the butter knife down, delicately, and then he took a sip of his coffee. “He is not altogether well,” said Thom, shaking his head. “He was desperate when I found him, his camp. Unraveled and confused.”

“What did you do, Thom?” she said.

“I put him in the dirt,” said Thom. He stared right at her, no kid gloves. “I roughed him up. But I didn’t kill him, Nume. I would not do that.”

“Why not?” she said, incredulous, but she was relieved. He could see it in the way she clutched her robe at her neck, an old habit. "Why, Thom? You have Cullen's order."

“Cullen's order is pure vanity,” said Thom. “He knows it, we all know it. Nobody is going to take that man's life, no matter how they may put on airs, because of you. Least of all me. He's Mina's father. And he was once my friend, before all of this fucking bullshit with him, and you, and who he truly is—before it all went down. That is the truth, Nume."

She lost her breath, jarred. She glanced out the window to the garden. Mina was graceful and simple, watering the daisies with a yellow watering can. She seemed to be having a conversation with them, all by herself. "Of course," she said. "I'm very sorry."

"Don't be sorry," said Thom.

He watched her watch her daughter out the window, and he was measured. The coffee had lost all of its steam in front of her. She looked back at him then, lovingly, spilled open and undone, like she had so many times before, times when it seemed she might actually love him after all. Her hair loose, her eyes a little tired. “I need to tell you something, too,” she said, like she'd been hanging onto it for a while. She reached across the table, and she took his hand. She turned it over pressed her thumbs into his palm, seeming to find comfort in the tough, unyielding skin there.

"What is it?"

"The day I got his letter, I threw up in the weeds. I thought I was pregnant," she said, very matter of fact. She looked away. "That's how I knew before."

He closed his hand around hers, firmly. This was a surprise. "Are you?" he said.

“No,” she said, and she shrugged."I'm not. I know for certain now."

It was unclear as to whether or not this was a letdown. Even still, Thom felt his heart sink.

"Oh, Thom."

"It's all right," he said. He looked at her, and he tried to smile. He held her hand in his. "It's all right, Nume. Thank you for telling me."

"You're welcome," she said, and she sighed. "I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about the letter, Thom." She was earnest, heartsick. "I didn’t know he would come. I promise. I didn't know. I was mistaken.”

Thom nodded. He believed her. He still unwrapped his hand from hers, slowly, pressed a kiss to her knuckles. He then set her hand down on the table, and he gently tucked the fingers under his own.

“What is it?” she said.

“You should see him, Nume."

She said nothing.

His voice deepened, became stern. He could feel it all constricting inside his chest, everything, but he was changed now, and there was no room for lying anymore. “He is her father, after all.”

“He abandoned her.”

“He abandoned you,” said Thom, nodding to himself, almost cruelly. “I know it’s hard to admit that to yourself, but he abandoned you, not her.”

She blinked. Twice. “What took him so long? Did he tell you?”

“You need to speak with him."

“Thom.”

“I ran into him by accident,” said Thom, relinquishing his hands, cracking his knuckles once more. “Taking a shortcut through the hills. I did not seek him out."

"You said he seemed unwell? What did you mean by that?"

"He was high, exhausted. He seemed on the verge of theatrical psychosis, but he was not unstable." Thom cleared his throat, took a deep breath. "I don't know what he's given up to be here. But I need you to know that I told him about Mina's playgroup, on Thursdays."

"You what?"

"I told him," said Thom, "that you're here, without her. He is mindful of her, Nume. He won't reveal himself to her without your permission. He is a man of his word in any case, or at least he always was with me, save for the endgame, which he never actually lied about, in action. I will not make excuses for him, but I believed him. And I don’t know if he’ll be here. I don't know if he'll actually come. He did not tell me, one way or another, but if he doesn't, then at least you’ll know it was all bullshit, and you can wash your hands of Solas and move on with your life. And if he does, then you can hear what he has to say and make your choice.”

He rose from the table, rather abrupt.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Home,” he said. He tried to be soft with her, especially after learning she'd thought she might be pregnant. That was delicate, and he wanted to touch and to hold her, to reassure her, but the strain was too much. “I’ve finished work on the fence for the day, but there’s more to be done, at the smithy. I’ll return in the evening, after dinner, if you wish.”

“Yes,” she said. She got up. She reached for him. He allowed. She pushed her fingers through his beard. She didn’t kiss him, just studied. She was trying to find the thing inside him, the thing that made him tick. She must have loved it somehow. Didn’t she? Didn’t she need him in her life, and isn’t that a symptom of love? She was so fucked up. She thought it must be. But in the space between Thom and the thing she'd been before, it had gotten too dark. She didn't know her way around anymore. “Please come.”

“I'll be here,” he said. His eyes felt watery, but they also felt dry. Everything was heavy. "And in the meantime, consider what I told you, Nume."

He took her head in his hand and kissed her forehead. It was rushed, detached, but that was a forced mechanism of the situation at hand. He loved her very much, but this life was not a gamble. Not for Thom, not anymore, and he would not take his chances. She seemed unable to act of her own volition, and so he gave her leave. He needed her to figure this out, for all of them. Of that, he was sure. Whether there was a place in her life for Solas, and what that place might be.

 

_Five Years Ago  
_

In Sahrnia, there was a tavern called the Winter Squirrel, and it was a stop-through for a lot of merchants and mercenary types coming down the mountain passes. Dragon fights made injured men as well, in need of booze and pretty girls, and on that day, the Inquisition was there—Nume and Solas, Thom and Vivienne, twenty scouts and four heavy guards at the entrance. Nume and Viv drank champagne at the bar. Viv had taught her a new way of braiding her hair, and Nume often felt mousey in a distinguished public, so Viv also taught her the noble ways around alcohol.

 _Champagne, my dear,_ she said, raising her glass, inspecting the bubbles. _Whatever you are, you must appear demure in the wolven eyes of the court. They like innocent women, and they’ll go easy on you, assume you’re dumb as an ice pick. Dismiss your pride, per the frivolous masquerade. Use this to your advantage so that when you enter the negotiation chambers, your opponent is prepared for a bimbo, only to be met with the highly leveled, intelligent likes of you._

Nume blushed. She was grateful, and eager. She had so little experience with this kind of shiny world, and there were bitter fiends on all sides of her. She, in fact, had very little pride. She did not trust herself the way she should have, but the job demanded she must. She liked Vivienne, strong and assured, but full of these acquired vulnerabilities and stories of her sadness that she made accessible to Nume after many months of traveling together.

They regarded the Winter Squirrel and all of its pretty bards and active courtship. Men with two hands: tankards and woman, one for each, possessive and stalwart and in charge. Only nobody was married here, and nothing had been decided. That's what Vivienne said. _How the people play games in the winter world of love, pretending they’re something when the end is more simple than they could ever imagine, my dear,_ she said. _But they either are, or they aren't._ _Something_ _._ _It's true. No matter what the well-wishers say. Remember that, Inquisitor.  
_

She and Vivienne touched glasses, and they drank their champagne.

Meanwhile, Solas and Thom played cards by the light of a candle at a corner table. They drank whiskey from a shared bottle, poured into crystal cups that the bartender had shined up special just for them.

 _I suspect you’ll want to go easy this round, Rainier._ Solas lifted his glass. He was a sharp, unforgiving man. But he was always smirking. You never knew when to believe him or to call his bluff. This was the mystery of Solas.

 _Have off it, elf,_ said Thom. He studied his hand. He had a good poker face, but he was quicker to the hilt. He had grown conservative in the wake of his revelation, in the way that he handled his affairs and exchanges with others. But at cards, and on the battlefield, he was still an aggressor of monstrous proportion. He did not like to lose, but he was not as good at cards as he was at swinging his sword, and so he often did. Even still, as a man, he liked the game. He held his own with Solas, even as he tended to go home empty. _I call._ He scrubbed at his beard, fearless, and dropped a handful of silver at the center of the table. He then laid down his hand. Two pair, aces on top.

 _Very good,_ said Solas, the wheels turning as he seemed to collect the entirety of the game in his mind. He then revealed his full house. _I win,_ he said. _But you played that hand well. Be proud.  
_

Thom laughed to himself, bighearted. He placed his hands behind his head and leaned back in his seat. _You’re man of many talents,_ said Thom. _It is no wonder._

Solas refilled their glasses, nonchalant. _What is no wonder._ He glanced up at Thom, who glanced at the Inquisitor.

She was laughing, and she had her mouth full of something—cheese perhaps. Viv was teaching her how to order elegantly from such a shit establishment as this.

 _She is not so hard to impress,_ said Solas, smiling, warm as he scooped up the cards, proceeded to shuffle. _I inspire her patience, though. That much is for sure._

 _Can’t say I don’t relate,_ said Thom. He plucked a toothpick from behind his ear, proceeded to pick his teeth. _It’s warm in here, don’t you think? For a fucking winter shanty._

 _I agree,_ said Solas. He swigged his whiskey, handed Thom the deck. _Your deal, unless you've had enough._

Thom gave him a look.  _Don't tempt me,_ he said. Solas smirked, once more. The cards touched the table, and he dealt.

Hours passed. At some point, they heard a voice, plucking, familiar, through the crowd.

 _You men,_ it said. It was Nume. She had her jacket over her shoulder. When they looked up, the game had been ceased for some time. They were just drinking, and shooting whatever shit there was left between them. When she caught their eye, she smiled. Demure. _Back to the fortress,_ she said.

They packed up their shit and headed out on horseback. The ride was frozen, made pleasant by booze and company, and when they all split off for the evening, Thom bid Solas farewell and went back to his quarters. He tossed wood chips into the fire and tried to take his mind of repentance. People seemed to forgive him here, the Inquisitor most of all, and this was something he had begun to force himself to acknowledge, to value even.

He never held a torch for her. Never. She was Solas’s girl from the start, and for all intents and purposes, Solas was his friend. Whatever would happen between Thom and Nume, it would happen much later.

Vivienne popped by very late to invite him out onto the battlements for a night cap. There were many scouts out there, smoking clove cigarettes with the guards. She could not sleep.

 _This place is so god awful and stuffy,_ said Vivienne at the fire pit, tugging a white pelt around her shoulders, under a chilled canopy of stars. _It keeps me awake, all this heat. The tavern was similarly stifling. The Sahrnians, they must love that feeling, being cooped up and out of the cold. Constricted. Personally, I've drawn claustrophobic. I thought perhaps you shared the notion. And with our elven lovers tucked away, I suppose it's just the two of us.  
_

_I share your notion, Madame de Fer._ He raised his glass, smiled. _Though I get the Sahrnians as well. Then again, I've spent a great deal of time in the cold._ They held a toast. Simple whiskey in wooden cups.

As they drank, they looked at the fire and its molten core. After a moment, she spoke. _It’s just Vivienne, my dear,_ she said, rather quiet, unexpected. _Madame de Fer exists only for the pleasures of the Court._

This was a place in the world, Thom knew it then, sharing drinks with Madame de Fer by the fire. She was not an easy woman to impress, let alone to entertain in any capacity. He would not squander this. He vowed to himself. He would not squander.


	5. Wolf

He saw her in his dreams. Like a whip, cracked to the chest. The night after the masquerade at the Winter Palace, she had been so out of sorts and finished with the human world that the two of them snuck away, in secret, and they left the palace grounds with only two guards, and they went into the upper alienage of Halamshiral. They found a bar there, called the Sailboat, and they got a little drunk, and they listened to the bard sing songs of innocence, and then they rented the room upstairs for six hours where they fucked and ate apples dipped in cream and then slept and slept until just before the orange light of morning. The apples had been served to them special by the bartender who recognized them off a flyer that was going around the alienage— _The Inquisitor is on Your Side,_ it had said. With a little drawing of him and Nume, holding hands and standing on top of a hill somewhere. Propaganda, to be certain. It had made the both of them uncomfortable, but at the very least it was the truth. Or it had been at the time.

Somewhere along the line, after heavenly moments like this, Solas had lost his footing and all traction and he came unstuck from the earth. Now he was falling upwards, headed into a sea of boiling stars. He was weary. She was like a drug, and the effects were stronger the closer he got, and so when he was inside her, he became a changed man.

But this is not enough, he knew now. A man cannot live inside of a woman. She’d had only one lover before him. She told him this, one night, unprompted, sometime after the masquerade and the bar in Halamshiral, while they sat in the glowing garden, eating oranges at Skyhold, on downtime. Cullen was nearby, playing chess with the Chargers—beating them one after the other after the other. It was a knock-down drag-out show, and wildly entertaining as it all culminated in a final round of do or die in which he faced the Iron Bull.

 _Try not to get your panties in a knot when I beat your ass into the mortar, Commander,_ said Bull, cracking his knuckles over the chess board. _Your screaming might scare the Chantry sisters._

Cullen merely smirked at this, high on his own achievement. He beat Iron Bull, and the two men shook hands and went off to the Rest to get drunk and look at the women. Cullen blushed while Bull tried to wrangle him out of his shell. To this day, the only person who had proven he could beat Cullen at chess was Solas. Solas. Always man of the hour in the Inquisition.

 _When I was twenty-one,_ _I was supposed to be married,_ said Nume that day, as if it was nothing at all, peeling the skin off the orange with her fingers. She dropped it to the earth where it mixed with the grass. They were sitting across from each other at a little table. Solas was so tall, their knees touched.

 _So why didn't you?_ he said, smirking. Dalish marriage rituals were particular, and no secret. They married young. First loves tended to last forever. What had he done differently? But then.

 _He died,_ she said, very even, peeling that orange, piece by piece. _On a hunt.  
_

Somewhere in the garden, a child screamed. It startled Solas. But it was only that she'd found a spider in her dress. He watched as she shook it out in a panic while the Chantry sisters merely laughed.

_Solas? Are you okay?_

_He died?_  said Solas. He'd lost his footing in their conversation. He thought he'd misheard.  _Is that what you said?_

 _In the Vinmarks,_ she said, nodding slowly. She bit into the orange. _It was a bad show. Haven’t I told you that?_

 _No,_ he said. _What happened to him?_

She looked up at this, like there was a piece missing, or like she didn't expect him to ask, and she was surprised. But she did not cry or crumble. _Bandits,_ she said. And she just shrugged. She never loved another man, she said after that, and for a long time, she swore she never would. Not until Solas, three years later. He drew numb. He held her hand, and he just held it. He did not know what to say. He just felt—he felt so deeply it harmed his insides. Meanwhile, she just smiled her steadfast smile, and she told him it was all right, not to worry about her, and she removed her hands from his, and he just continued to watch her peel the rest of her orange with care, and then she broke what was left of it apart into little pieces and spread them out evenly on the table to admire their natural simplicity.

She was a careful woman, Nume. She did everything slowly, with care. And now he saw a large part of why. She never charged the line in battle, and she did not like it when he charged the line. She did not like it when anyone charged the line—Bull or Sera or Vivienne or Varric, Dorian or Cassandra or Cole or Thom. Nobody should be charging the line, as far as she was concerned. Of course, somebody had to charge the line. This was a war. So she let them do it. But she would hold his hand so hard in the tent after a fight, staring into the ceiling where he’d conjure magical butterflies that she loved. It was like she was staring into the great mouth of god, wondering when it would eat her whole.

The revelation of Nume’s lost love changed things for Solas. He related to her on such miracle proportions after that. Before, he’d thought her caution was merely a product of her inexperience. That she was a twenty-four-year-old Dalish huntress, not hardened to battle and so unsure of what it meant to risk strategically. This was, of course, true. But it was not all there was, and learning the rest tore him open. It just tore him open. His heart spilled out at her feet, in pieces. Before, she had been a mystery. A fantasy, a dream. A woman who liked the bards in Halamshiral, who ate apples, unclothed, freckled and blue-eyed with her bow and her arrows, her dresses that she liked to wear in the daytime. Her shins, her hands and her temples, these things that he liked to kiss and touch. But then she was something else. They became the same, him and her, and the reality of her sad backstory made her irrevocably real in ways that he was not prepared to understand.

They went too hard, too soon after that, building their hopes and dreams on a foundation of nothing but negative space and interference—or that’s how Solas saw it now. As if the world might yank the rug out from beneath him at any moment, he held onto her. At first, it brought them closer together, but it could only last for so long. Solas’s elegant brain rewired itself until he realized the truth behind his obsession: that one day, she would die, and she would take him with her. And if it only had to be him, that he could deal with, that he could visualize, but losing her—

Perhaps if one of them had been clean from tragedy then that one could have saved the other. He thought about this sometimes, selfishly. He had made plans to unravel the Veil well before the Inquisition, and for a time, he had earnestly changed his mind based on all that he had found there—Nume, his friends, a new purpose. But eventually, it was all bullshit. He could fill the new world with heart and memories and sentiment, and he could fill his world with her, but their mortality made this life impossible to unlock. He knew she did not feel the same. Her perspective was her own, and he knew that she therefore held hope for them, and she had fallen for him earnestly as he had fallen for her, but unlike Solas, all she saw was their future, clear as a window. Meanwhile, as a coward, he saw only their end.

He wondered now, where he stayed in his camp well removed from the outskirts so as to avoid another run-in with Rainier, if in another world, another universe, another woman waited. Perhaps another version of Nume, or just a different woman altogether. One absolved of misery and loss by chance and good luck and a good family, a woman made of only possibilities, as this might have deluded him long enough to make him feel and understand deeply the beauty and company of mortality. No dead loved ones to haunt her, as they haunted him. Perhaps there, in that world, he was happy. He found comfort in this fantasy, for a little while.

But in the distance, that night, at his camp, he could hear the sounds of the living, the fireworks as the town of Redcliffe celebrated one of its many archaic and foreign traditions. He’d seen a parade of gypsy women go by while he was washing his clothes in the river earlier that day, and they were covered in gold jewelry that jangled like bells, headed into the village, and one of them had given him a long look with wide, hazel eyes as she passed, and it made him want, but then she was gone.

How long had it been? Since he'd been touched by a woman, by anyone who he was not fighting or blessing or hurting. Somebody he cared about. That night, he found his release, alone, in the dark of the tent, as he did on occasion. He thought of Nume, the way she felt, as he came. He always thought of Nume and the way she felt as he came. The last time he’d touched her, he’d put a child inside her—an ultimate act of mortality by a seemingly immortal man. The contradiction struck him now as so profound while he lie there, limp, in the wake of some fake ecstasy, that he wept, and he felt guilty and ashamed for all that he had miscalculated. For how he had underestimated her, and himself, and the two of them together, and what they could have overcome if he had just told her the truth. But he was not immortal anymore. He gave that up to travel here, to the high valleys of the Hinterlands, hoping—toiling like a mad man—that she would let him see the thing that he had wrought here. The person. The girl he had made. His daughter. Biological and mechanical proof that he existed, that the two of them, together, existed, that he and all of his emotional turmoil, no matter how broken and filled with regret, were real. _Real_ had used to scare him, but now it was what he had chosen and all that he had left.

He lit a joint. He smoked it. He lit another. He lie on his back outside now, his body pressing directly into the cold dirt, awake in a cloud of white smoke, all night, smoking, and he watched the boiling stars, rushing toward him at a million miles per hour as he hung onto one thing, the only thing that kept him from exploding inside their heat.

 _Nume is in the house alone on Thursdays,_ Rainier had said. Or something like that. Thursdays. _She uses it for chores, and to gather her energies._ Chores. Energies. _If one wanted to speak with her, alone, that would be the time to do it._

Thursday. Chores. Energies.

Solas finally fell asleep just as the moon had dipped behind the green and faraway horizon of the Hinterlands. This place was a pastoral dream. It reminded him so deeply of his childhood, of all that he had lost. Even still, he had come to appreciate the modesty of nature once again, its quietude and its strength as he camped in the guts of southern Thedas and waited for Thursday.

He thought constantly about the day that courier spy had come to him. Just a runner he'd hired on an as-needed basis, not even a true believer to the cause or whatever the fuck he called it now. That day, she had come to him of her own volition, argued her way through the fortress he'd built of his sweat and magic in the Hundred Pillars mountains on the border between the Free Marches and Tevinter, and she knocked on his door, and she came inside of his quarters, and she could not have been more than eighteen. Her hair was dark, and her eyes were a crystal blue, and she was out of breath from arguing with guards and slipping past the order-bound soldiers, and she told him what she'd seen—what she'd seen in Redcliffe.

 _Inquisitor Lavellan has a child,_ she said. She bent over, leaning on her palms against the desk. She was out of breath, a small elf but robust and he wondered now if he would ever see her again. If she had survived the uprising of his exit. He hoped she had been one of the deserters, but there was no way to be sure, not anymore. _She has a child, a daughter, and she is about four years old._ Looking up, the elf girl shook her head, incredulous. _According to the Inquisition scouts in the city, she's yours._

He sent for confirmation, twenty more scouts, via eluvian, and it all came back the same in the stretch of a week. _Nume Lavellan, Thom Rainier, and an elven girl in the Hinterlands._   _Four years old. Yours.  
_

Once he knew it was true, he lost his guts in the snowy wilderness somewhere outside the fortress. He wandered four days and four nights, no food or water as he cleansed himself by starlight and made his choice. When he returned, ending imminent, news had spread about the child, and the troops were in disarray. They'd been plotting a massive slave rebellion in Tevinter, one set to occur within the year as a means of preparation for what came in the wake of the Veil, but now half of them had fled for their lives, sensing his clamor and unrest swelling in the atmosphere. _The stars seem to bleed_ , they said. _The grief of Fen'harel_ , they said. It could mean only the end. So they left.

But there were many people who did not take kindly to Solas's choice. An entire coup, in fact, that rose in his four-days absence. His was no small cause, and the reformation of a slave nation was no small undertaking. If they were to succeed, they needed his power, and they needed his armies. He had to bring down the mountain to escape the fortress. It was not the first time he'd had to bring down a mountain to put an end to his own despair, but he didn't care. He just didn't fucking care. He would find another way to do good in this world. It would not be as fast, but it was what he had to do.

And now, in Solas's dreams that night in the Hinterlands, on the eve of Thursday, he saw Nume. It was short for Blar'nume, and it meant _violet_ in the language of the People. Sad flower. And she undressed before him, and she was standing, naked in the river, surrounded by little purple fish, and she held out her hand, and she told him she was okay. She was just okay, and this was the singularity that could redeem him of all he had lost inside himself. If not in her heart, which he knew was a true probability, than at least in his own so that he could go on living, or die, either way, he would be free in this world he had created by mistake—but it was a good mistake, it had to be, because that was his choice, and all that mattered was this, and that she had found a way to save herself in his absence. That he had chosen, and that she was okay.

The rest would reveal itself tomorrow, on Thursday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literal translation of _Blar'nume_ is "sad flower," courtesy of Fenxshiral's Elvhen Lexicon. Interpretive translation to "violet," and its usage as a name, is my own. Thanks Viking_woman for your comment that this once nameless Lavellan reminded you of a violet.  <3 -gala


End file.
